Editor’s Introduction

The first three articles in this issue of Enterprise & Society are a continuation of our special issue on gender and business, for which Angel Kwolek-Folland and David Sicilia served as guest editors. Béatrice Craig leads off with a study of women engaged in retail trade during the nineteenth century in the northern French city of Lille and its environs. She has compiled data from tax rolls, city directories, and census schedules and uses them, along with other sources, to analyze trends in female ownership patterns and to discuss the meaning of female ownership. Lisa Jacobson examines the role of advertising in the creation of the idealized and very masculine “boy consumer.” Grietjie Verhoef’s article is a study of female participation in South African stokvels, a type of micro finance common in many developing countries. The fourth article in this issue is a careful analysis by Mark Wilson of an important but little-studied industry during the American Civil War, the tent industry. There is also a gender component to this essay, because Wilson finds that the mercantile firms that were the leading contractors in the industry employed a large number of female workers. The final article in this issue is a study by Hartmut Berghoff of the heyday of the German harmonica industry, which dominated the world market for this immensely popular consumer product.